The anti-vaccine camp and the effect of Fear, Inc.

I received this very heartfelt note from a friend who is torn over whether to vaccinate her 4-year-old son against the pandemic H1N1 flu:

I’m just so nervous about the vaccine since there’s so much controversy. I don’t know which is worse, taking our chances to not get the flu or getting the vaccine and it being new and untested and possibly harmful? I just want to do the right thing. I’m scared.

Her note came on the heels of a very spirited and interesting debate among members of the Association of Health Care Journalists. One of the health writers asked her colleagues to suggest a credible source to discuss why the swine flu vaccine might not be safe.

Several people offered up names like Dr. Joseph Mercola or Dr. Kent Holtorf, who was recently featured on Fox News as an infectious disease expert.
Within minutes, other health writers dissected the profit-driven conflicts of interest that people like Dr. Mercola and Dr. Holtorf have.
Dr. Holtorf is not an infectious disease expert, he is a California-based purveyor of bioidentical hormones and natural therapies. Much of the information he gives in the above Fox News report is flat-out wrong. For example, there are no adjuvants, or chemical boosters, in the U.S. H1N1 seasonal flu shot.
Futhermore, it is being made in several preservative-free formulations, for those who are concerned about exposure to Thimerosal.
My son James got one of them, the FluMist nasal spray.
Not that the preservative is the evil Holtorf describes. The type of mercury in Thimerosal is ethyl mercury not methyl mercury, and it is significantly less toxic and more quickly cleared from the body than methyl mercury. Historically, before Thimerisal, contamination in vaccines was a killer.

A stirring counter arguments to the anti-vaccine fear industry has just appeared in Wired Magazine. An excerpt from “How panicked parents skipping shots endanger us all:”

This isn’t a religious dispute, like the debate over creationism and intelligent design. It’s a challenge to traditional science that crosses party, class, and religious lines. It is partly a reaction to Big Pharma’s blunders and PR missteps, from Vioxx to illegal marketing ploys, which have encouraged a distrust of experts. It is also, ironically, a product of the era of instant communication and easy access to information. The doubters and deniers are empowered by the Internet (online, nobody knows you’re not a doctor) and helped by the mainstream media, which has an interest in pumping up bad science to create a “debate” where there should be none.

What bothers me most about the misinformation spread by Holtorf is that it terrifies people needlessly. It’s good that people read skeptically. But why reserve your skepticism for the vaccine industry and not the fear industry? Jenny McCarthy, the former Playboy centerfold who has an autistic son, is surely sincere in her beliefs. But she’s a not a physician. And Holtorf? He has built a thriving practice by hawking fear.